


Yerba Buena

by juniperpines



Category: Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: F/M, Shore Leave
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-27
Updated: 2014-06-27
Packaged: 2018-02-06 12:19:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1857831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juniperpines/pseuds/juniperpines
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Follows the Voyager episode "Inside Man."</p>
    </blockquote>





	Yerba Buena

**Author's Note:**

> Follows the Voyager episode "Inside Man."

“You’re drunk,” he says in her ear, for the third time since they left the bar.

It’s neither more nor less true than the first two times, but the idea itself seems to amuse him, to make him pull her tighter into his arms.

Deanna takes account of herself. She’s steady enough on her feet where they are standing together near the railing of the boat, the only passengers who have decided to brave the trip outside. Will wanted to see the view of the city as it recedes behind them. If she’s clutching his arm where it lays across her stomach, if her fingers are tangled with his, it’s only because she likes the feel of it. Cold marine wind whips across the rear deck of the ferry, messing her hair insistently, and doesn’t bother her at all.

Is it the glow of shore leave, of his heat radiating through their thin coats, of the four varieties of Vulcan port that Maril insisted they try at the cafe? Who can really know, and who needs to know? It’s a very *human* impulse, she decides, to dissect happiness away and look for root causes.

“We’ll have to remember that place,” is what she says in the end. Maril called it a cafe, but it turned out to be a jazz club-slash-wine bar. For its reputation as a Starfleet company town, San Francisco was still bohemian enough in certain places. The locals embraced wave after wave of throwback trends and boutique interests from distant corners of the quadrant. If it wasn’t musical extracts of the post-atomic horror, it was fine dining a la the rarefied monastic cuisine of the mountains of Yorba III.

This season, it happened that everyone was drinking Vulcan port again, with all the enthusiasm of first contact. Maril knew all about the terroir of each vintage of the alien wine, and how a taste of one led logically and undeniably to the next, like she must lead her young students across the bay through the rigors of basic calculus. All three Starfleet officers were able to trade anecdotes about the first Vulcans to visit the Crash-N-Burn bar in Bozeman, in exchange for her more contemporary knowledge.

Maril was sweet and lively, and unassuming. She didn’t seem to mind when Will and Deanna snuck away to the dance floor not long after he finally arrived -- and maybe it was a bit rude, but they hadn’t seen each other in weeks -- leaving her alone with Barclay. She was kind to Reg as he tried to chat about fermentation rates and the particular ratios of inert gases in the Vulcan atmosphere, although he could hardly hear her over the music and seemed to have trouble focusing on their conversation amid the noise. He was probably overmatched in her, but then again there aren’t too many women from Will Riker’s stable of exes who would suit Reg Barclay.

Still, Deanna decides again that she quite likes Maril. “Why did you and Maril stop seeing each other, anyway?” she asks, brushing her wind-tangled hair away from her eyes. The city lights are fading into bright smudges on the hilly horizon, far more numerous than the stars in the glare of the city sky.

His laughter rumbles against her back. “Now I know you’re drunk.”

“How?”

“Your feelings were rambling.” They haven’t spent much energy cultivating their old telepathic bond, but Will has a sense of her now that he says he never quite had before.

“Indulge me.”

His hand sheaths her arm, and his lips cover hers without hesitation. _For the rest of my life._

She’s not sure he meant to send that. He knows she shies away from talk of forever, that it’s more likely to bring on a lecture about the vagaries of fate and philosophies of living in the present than to make her fall at his feet. But he had been on the same tour of Vulcan vintages she had, and he feels pleasantly fuzzy around the edges. It rings around inside her head in a sustained echo. Maybe the thought just washed over, like a levee overtopped.

He smells like wood smoke and fermented berries, strangely primitive. This is not what she meant at all, but she laughs against his mouth, leans in and pulls him closer with her hand at his elbow. “Your lips are cold,” she says when they break apart. She tucks her face against his neck, enjoying the moored feeling of his arms around her back. “So tell me?”

It takes him a moment to remember what she was after. “Maril? That was no big thing. We met at a conference at headquarters years ago and hit it off for a while. She took me rock climbing in Yosemite once, much later.”

“I like her,” Deanna shares.

He pinches her side. “Should I start seeing her again?”

“I just wonder if she’s right for Reg. The outdoorsiness, the nightlife…”

“Maybe she’d be good for him. Anyway, it was just one date. Seems like you’ve gotten awfully protective of Mr. Broccoli over the years.”

“I haven’t,” she denies, and might have gone on defending herself but something bright catches her eye in the sky. Maybe another ship coming home, maybe a shooting star. For all the strange wonders they see in space, they have to come home to see meteorites streaking across the sky. “Isn’t it funny how the fog makes the city lights blend into the stars,” she finds herself saying. “It’s like two sets of old friends in the same room.” She has never seen San Francisco from this angle before, though, low on the water. The city seems spread wide before them as the ferry moves across the dark water to Tiburon, like an old acquaintance you don’t recognize from an odd angle, or an old love making itself available again.

 _He’s right,_ she thinks as she tracks her own thoughts. _You are drunk._

“I never knew this place very well,” he is saying when she realizes he is speaking again. “I was hardly here unless I was in class, not as often as I should have been.” The Academy complex stands tall and distinct in the northwest corner of the city. “I was always at the flight range near Saturn. Had to make sure my ticket was punched.” He sounds a bit rueful.

“We can play tourist a bit this week. I always loved San Francisco,” she says dreamily. A lot of the cadets took advantage of their new transporter and shuttle privileges and spent weekends in Paris, Sydney, Alexandria, the Serengeti, the Canadian Rockies, but Deanna still had obligations to travel occasionally with Lwaxana and her diplomatic entourage. She enjoyed quieter times when left to herself, before other experiences helped stoke her wanderlust again. “I loved walking by the ocean, even if the water was always too cold to swim, and getting espresso and biscotti in North Beach.”

“Where’s that?”

She takes his large hand in hers to point, leading him away from the Pacific edge and the Golden Gate, back closer to downtown. “I think it’s over there. It’s hard to tell in the dark. Near Coit Tower.”

“There’s a landmark I remember,” he says of the spotlit round tower on the hill, shining white. Telegraph Hill, supplies a corner of her mind. “That was a good memory.” He kisses her neck, and the feel of it sweeps through her in a wave of fresh arousal. It blends perfectly with the sense of his memory, like lining up two photographs of the same streetscape from different eras. It feels like a *very* good memory.

Her eyes roll up to the sky with a smile. It’s been too long since they’ve been together like this, not interrupted by inopportune calls on the comm system or month-long special assignments to sectors halfway across the quadrant. They’ve taken for granted for so long that Starfleet has kept them in such a close situation, but now even these little separations are harder to take. They keep their Starfleet officer lives in perfect order just as ever, waiting until they come back together. It’s exciting, too, exhilarating to let this part of themselves have its way again.

It feels so good, she doesn’t even care that he’s remembering someone else. “Maybe you should find her and tell her about it,” she teases.

He freezes in his traverse of the curve of her neck. “What do you mean?”

“The woman in your memory.”

“She’s right here,” he says, amused. “Don’t you remember?”

“When were we in San Francisco together before?” A dozen times, but not *together.* “I think you have me confused with one of your other conquests.”

He shakes his head. “I can’t believe you forgot those days we spent here on that trip we took to Angel Falls.”

“While the captain was in La Barre? Will, you know as well as I that we weren’t--”

“No, the first time.” She can feel his concentration toward her deepening and the memory slipping around her, like someone else’s coat being draped over her shoulders. She sees herself leading him by the hand toward the base of the tower, so many years younger, the entire vista of the bay and the far hills background to her smile. He was utterly enchanted by her back then, thrumming with pride and energy as she talked the guard into letting them up to the observation deck after hours. They walked up flights of stairs, out of breath at the top, and so worth the effort. How had he never done this before she came along? And how different things looked from a few stories up above the canopy of the city trees, as they watched shuttlecraft buzz both bridges on approach through the thick, open arches of the tower. She hears the flocks of wild parrots that have been protected for hundreds of years in the neighboring trees, hears him saying, _I think you could convince anyone of anything._ Like a dare, her delicate hands were at the waist of his pants, and at first the air was cool but then her sweet mouth was around his cock, and he was coming, too fast and so, so hard--

“I didn’t know you could do that,” she says, breathless as the moment fades.

He leans his head against hers, still right there with her. “I can’t believe you didn’t remember. That’s always been one of my favorite memories.”

“When I think of that trip, I think of those days we spent in our hotel room at the Falls.” Now she can recall his sweet insistence on reciprocating, days later and several times over. His cheek was smooth against her belly afterward. She remembers the hot equatorial light through the thin curtains, her own sweaty satisfaction. “And convincing you to go to that nude beach in Rio.” He was so straight-laced back then, living his life out the Starfleet officer’s manual as if it could take him right to the top.

“You won that bet,” he allows with a laugh; his tone admits no loss.

She still sees hints of her young lieutenant sometimes, in the junior officers who are ready to jump out of their skins when he stands over their shoulders. She fell in love with that side of him too, more than once, with his decisiveness and his focus. He loosened up long ago and embraced pleasure seeking with a passion. Only someone who knows him as well as she does can see how it’s a second language to him. There were times she thought he might run aground on one extreme or the other, but not in years.

People change. People are always changing.

The boat docks. The walk to the hotel is along the bayfront, near the boulders of the breakwater. She only stumbles once. “I’m not half as drunk as in Montana,” she says as she leans her head against his shoulder, while he keys in the access code to the room.

“If you were I’d be carrying you. Was that the goal?”

“Maybe exactly half.” She has no intention of being caught off guard the next time some lunatic scientist wants to drink her under the table. It’s hard to build up a tolerance when you only have regular access to synthehol.

“So conscientious.” This time she knows he has picked up on more than the temperature of her thoughts.

He takes her to bed, runs his large hands along her calves and lets her shoes drop to the floor. Sometimes it shakes her how much he is capable of hearing, and how they are becoming more equal in that way. She has to set aside her advantage to be with him. Maybe that’s something she’s always known, that there would have to be a peace treaty, if they could ever admit they’d both been conquered.

She is a connoisseur of beds, and this one is spectacular. She is so relaxed that she lets her arms and legs fall wherever they will. He settles next to her, frees her hair and combs his fingers through its length. “You look like a snow angel.”

“I’m about to melt,” she promises.

“Good.” He lowers his mouth to hers, stroking the underside of her chin with one crooked finger, and kisses her deeply.

Unhurriedly he does the things that have been on his mind all night: traces a hot path with his lips along the skin at the border of her neckline, undoes her blouse and spreads it aside. _Just breathe,_ he suggests.

She assents, closing her eyes and finding the slow rhythm of breath that fits around the sensations of his skilled mouth and hands on her breasts, encouraging him with kneading fingers on his shoulders and the deepening slip of her mind into his, with its own friction. It’s not impossible to share this with more than one person in a lifetime. There have been others, humans and telepaths, with whom she felt the potential. But this fullness of physical pleasure, the way it takes the mental connection and makes it so experiential and real, has only ever been with him. When he enters her, he is already inside her, and she in him. When they move together, as he teases her next orgasm from her, there is a searing ecstasy in the paradox of being so totally owned by someone who has no desire to truly possess her.

“Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had met you at the Academy. Think of all the fun we could have had.” It is hours later, and they are drinking champagne and waiting for the sun to rise.

“You would have had to leave the flight range to meet me.” She sets aside her glass and tucks herself under his arm, lays her tipsy head against his naked chest. They were in different years, and aside from fate there is no good reason their paths should have crossed and crossed and crossed again.

“I might never have made it off the planet again.”

“Somehow I doubt that,” she says with a soft smile.

“It happens.” He strokes the skin of her bare back. “You know Maril has never left Earth.”

“I didn’t know that was possible anymore. She seems so adventurous.”

“She’s a rare bird. She says she doesn’t like the idea of being so far from home. There’s a reason I wanted to introduce her to Barclay.”

“Do you think shared neurosis is a good foundation for a relationship?”

“I don’t grant the premise.” He takes her hand and presses a soft kiss to her fingers. It may be the bubbles but his eyes seem almost urgently blue.  “Say what you will about Barclay -- we’ve all said enough -- he’s always been out there with us, in spite of his fears. Maybe he’d be as good for her as she could be for him. Convince her to go wine-tasting on Vulcan.”

There is something more in his thoughts, something half-formed that she can't yet see.  Something expectant and ready, like the bud of a flower that hasn't yet burst.  Deanna settles her head in his embrace, no desire to pluck the thought from him before it is ripe, and more ready to see the first light of dawn touch the sky. “I guess we’ll just have to see what happens.”


End file.
